Phoenix Woman
by TheGirlWhoBelievedInStars
Summary: His phoenix is gone - the first dead, and the other soon to be with her. Xenophilius can't help but wish they were still home - if only.


_Written for the Scrabble Bonuses Competition, for PHLOX: Phoenix, hangover, lonely, Obliviate, Xenophilius Lovegood._

_For those that may be wondering, karzeleks are in fact Polish legend, "treasurers" who protect gems and precious metals but are generally helpful to miners. However, after warning an offender with a handful of dirt thrown at them, the karzelek will punish those who are insulting to them - for instance, those who whistle or throw rocks - by pushing them into chasms or causing tunnels to collapse. The fenikskobieta, though, is of my own invention._

* * *

Phoenix Woman

I discovered their existence on a bland, grey day in Poland. Looking for a local karzelek was no easy task, so I'd been there a while, researching the spirit that Stewart Pidley, Department of Magical Creatures, had requested be written about. In any case, sitting in a decrepit pub across from a grubby-faced Pole who seemed to have a story to tell (and, as a bonus, in English), I was close to locating one.

"Shame, really," the thickly-accented miner told me gravely, "she was quite young, too. Dunno why she had such an ambition to work down in them mines, Miss Marjan, but she was persistent, that girl. Happy as can be when her father let her go down there. Went down whistling, came up crushed. Her Papa was heartbroken. Rockslides, they aren't forgiving." The man looked down into the depths of his drink and after a moment took a swig from the glass.

"Quite a shame, sir, you're right," I responded politely, fingering the pendant around my neck. Karzeleks, as one might know, cause rockslides. Karzeleks despise whistling.

As if reading my thoughts, the miner opposite me continued abruptly. "They say it was a karzelek, although I must say, I don't believe that side of the story."

I nodded knowingly. There is no way to convince a Muggle of the existences of magical beasts without outright showing one to them, and even then most Muggles will believe this to be a hoax or simply evidence that they are losing their marbles. Of course, this is not true. Even many wizards are reluctant to admit the reality of some beasts: take nargles, for instance.

"Hey baby sister's just like her, you know," the man noted as an afterthought. "Well, she's nearly in her twenties now, but I suppose Marjan would be nearly forty. Miss Wikta is very much her duplicate – headstrong, brave, undeniably boyish. It's as if Miss Marjan was a fenikskobieta – but of course, as I've said, I don't believe in such fairy tales. No facts."

"A feniks – a _what_?" I asked, suddenly intrigued.

"_Fenikskobieta_," the miner repeated. "Phoenix woman, in English. But really, I can assure you they do not exist – " and he went into Polish, speaking quickly and loudly in what I assume was a rant about the lack of logic in the heads of most Polish miners.

A fenikskobieta.

Now, _this_ was something I wanted to research.

* * *

fenikskobieta (n.) feɪ ∙ nɪks ∙ koʊ ∙ bi∙ ɛ∙ tə. 1. the event in which a woman is killed as a result of fire and continues to transfer her personality to the young girl she loves most throughout several generations as a gift of a phoenix. 2. the person that currently holds the original woman's personality.

* * *

He rereads the article again, out loud, wavering on the words, stumbling on the memories as they pound against his brain.

She is gone, his lovely phoenix woman – because she _was_ one, he can tell, because Luna is every bit the same as she – and Luna is gone, and he will never

get

her

back.

He has tried but it never will work, he knows now, after his home has been destroyed, after he has been tortured, after he has been drained of his happiness by the dementors, and even he will no longer believe in getting her back. She will never survive, his phoenix, and she would come back in a young girl she loves, but Luna loves no young girl as if she were her own, because she is too young, and she will die too young.

Something is pummeling his skull, his insides are falling out, and his heart is on fire, because without them he is alone and incomplete

and he has never been alone: even while Luna was at school, while Ardelis was away, he was surrounded by creatures. But it was because of her that they were there. He hadn't believed before her. She had convinced him, shown him they were real, but she had told him that he who carries the braided hair of the centaur would never be alone, and look how far that had gotten him – alone in every way, without comfort, without love, and he reaches once again for the bottle of firewhisky that sits at his desk, even though he knows he shouldn't.

He stumbles on the memories.

And as his printed magazines fly around him, he can't bear the pain of what he can remember, and he will not bear that pain. So he draws his wand, and he directs it at his forehead, and he whispers a word that he'll never remember.

"Obliviate."

* * *

A young woman, sixteen or seventeen, perhaps, oddly dressed, returns to a recently-rebuilt tower that must be her home. "Daddy?" she calls as she steps through the doorway.

She doesn't find her daddy. Instead, she discovers a shell of a man, neither in death nor in life, trapped between the falling ashes and the rebirth of the rising flame.


End file.
